Since the early stages of formal educational activities, the learning process was
standardized as a procedure that required social interaction between instructors and
learners in order to be facilitated. Until now, the standard way of ‘learning’ is through
attending a class at a school or university. There are many research attempts that target
to accommodate VR technology in the learning process in order to create a much realistic
as possible an environment for the learner and simulate real-life social interaction
scenarios in which the learner can test his newly acquired skills and use them to solve a
problem or perform a task. There are some basic educational theories on which one can
be based in order to create such learning environment, suitable for instructional usage
and through that, enhancing the learning process and facilitating learning in a way that
might be extremely difficult otherwise. Today’s MOOC platforms like Coursera or Udemy
can provide a fairly accurate simulation of the learning process inside a class-room, but
limited in social interaction due to the lack of ‘presence’ (‘feeling of being and doing there’
in a virtual environment).
On that end, we propose an innovative online social VR platform which can simulate a
number of social interaction cues presented in a real classroom. We implemented a
University-like virtual auditorium environment with which the user can attend a course
seminar via a mobile VR device or his/her smartphone. Our Social Virtual Learning
platform is capable of simulating the entire process of a lecture utilizing a Server-HostClient architecture which can simulate the auditorium, the professor and the students. To
the best of our knowledge, there is no such platform that provides a highly accurate
virtual collaborative learning experience that could ‘realistically simulate’ the social
interaction cues of a real physical attendance.